


Wolf

by AmyWilldo



Category: Original Work
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-08 16:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18626542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmyWilldo/pseuds/AmyWilldo
Summary: An end of the world, or an ice age.An end of humans, or an end of humanity.An escape into wolf nature or a trap.A reckoning between science and magic, or a marriage.Short stories in a cold world.





	1. Wolf I

“You shouldn’t be in there!”

She paid the shout no attention. She’d prepared for this for seven times sennights. She’d performed the rituals perfectly, the cleansing with the rose quartz, the agony of the aconite and mace, the new tattoos on the ears, and thighs and even discreetly on the knuckles, and the hours of changing, of the only rituals she’d found in all the dusty dusky books in all the covens she’d visited, the See-it-True, the Do-my-Will. 

No. She knew what she was about and she meant to achieve it without interruption. The voice was but a stepping stone along the path and one she’d marked out at that. He’d been no trouble at all. Not in the sad little caff at the bottom of this building, with his books spread across the table, his dedication to the blinking screen and lack of companionship. Not in the dingy bar where she’d fed him drinks laced with potions, bitter under the lemon and green mango. And certainly not in his single bed, where no additional potions or spells had been needed to do her will. She’d been more invested in that action than she’d intended, as the clothes had come off and the brown muscles revealed themselves, harder than she’d expected, hairier too, more than she’d counted upon but a lamb afterwards, for all that, like any of the others. His security card, Rob Wood, almost too easy to find atop his wallet, like it was waiting for her. He’d written his password on the inside of a paper inside the plastic, and she held it before the screen now, the last step between her and the genesplice, her and her true wolf nature. 

She read it over again at the key pad. H3c9t3. Odd that a minion of science, especially as skilled as the papers made him out to be would even know her mistress, let alone use Her name to protect his secrets.

She looked back at the glass. He was there, still, but behind him a team of white coated doctors. Or scientists. Watching her. No matter.

She entered the passcode carefully.

“Think before you do this. What’s your name again,” he said, fastening the top button fastidiously, tidying himself away. His voice calm, unhurried now, and the glass between them, no harm in answering.

She paused. 

“Morgan.”

“Of course it is. Morgan, or Morrigane, or Ravene, or Lupa, you lot aren’t very original are you? Think. There’s pain and death down the path in the cabinet and you’ve none of the prep work done. Which you’d know if you were a test subject. Last chance, leave it alone.”

The laugh bubbled out of her, and the paper trembled in her hand. “I’ve done all the prep work I need.”

The door to the cabinet finally opened, a refrigerator inside, and vials inside that sitting sedately on a shelf. All the same label. A colourless liquid, nothing like her own potions.  
A woman’s voice behind her. “We don’t even know if your genes are compatible.”

She turned back to the glass, vial in hand. The speaker at the glass, one palm stretched to it, no white coat she, glasses, t-shirt and jeans, smaller than her, no threat. The tips of her teeth are white against her mouth.

“I know. I know they are.” She let her displeasure flavour her voice, into the snarl her ex had complained of. “I know.” 

She pulled her sterile syringe from its case. Wiped down her arm with the mediswipe. 

“Twenty mills. That’s two lots if your syringe holds 10. Put the cap back on when you’re done and sit down.” 

The woman’s voice again. As disinterested as if Morgan had been making a cup of tea. 

“Laura,” Rob says, “don’t help.” 

The woman is saying something about her needing the same dose as the test cases, but she’s paying no attention, focusing on the liquid and the marker on the syringe. She doesn’t like the idea of two needles, but if she needs it, she’s prepared.

The first flush, after the sting, is as cold as sapphire winter, as cold as if she’d stepped outside into the cold of the night, as cold as if she’d fallen asleep in a snowdrift, and she tastes copper in her throat. Her right arm tingles unpleasantly, although it’s her left that she’s injected. The next syringe takes an eternity to fill, and she taps the bubbles out, as it shimmers and simmers in the fluorescent light. She shakes her head to clear her vision.

She’s going faster than the test cases, the woman is saying. 

“I know how to pick them,” Rob is saying, and she feels the smugness through the glass, and when she turns her head, her vision blurring with the motion, he’s looking at her as if the glass isn’t there, eyes big and brown and she remembers the way he bit her neck, and tries to finger it, but her hands leave trails in the air.

“I picked you,” she says, and she can hear the growl behind the words that she hadn’t meant to put in. “I picked you,” she says again, and this time she hears the question in the words that she hadn’t meant to put in either.

“That’s right,” Rob says, and she really doesn’t know him at all, for all that she’s taken his passcode, and his security card, and his bed, and his drink. “Of course you did. Now be a good girl, and take your medicine.”

When she has her teeth, her real teeth, for all that hers feel like cardboard now, she will rip his throat from one side to another. All the other people on her list who have a predetermined appointment with her wolf, they can wait. 

She turns back to the task at hand, that between her and her wolf. The second syringe, she injects into her neck, because she can keep that still against the tremble in her arm. She fumbles the cap back on, and jams the vial back into the cabinet, and shuts the door against the brightness. The light in the lab has begun to strobe unpleasantly, and she tries to shield her eyes with her arms. Her arms won’t move, sacks of wheat attached at her shoulders, weighing her down, and she fights the sinking feeling with her hands braced at the bench.

“Nine for you, ten for me,” his voice says, but she can’t turn her neck now. “We’ll put her with the others and call it a day on the wild ones, I think. No more games.”

There’s a volume of smell in the air. There’s taste in her mouth, a world of meaning in each copper drop. She can hear heartbeats, hers, theirs, as her eyelids flutter closed, and her head drops onto her hands. She feels nothing.


	2. Wolf II

Laura III howls, high notes of pain and frustration. Her hands struggle to find purchase on the icy branch.

“Breathe,” coaxes Laura II. “Just breathe through it all, and the pups will be here soon enough.”

Her stomach relaxes again. Two minutes. When she’s recovered her breath, she snarls at her mother.

“It’s not meant to be like this. In the snow and on the ice. Not a baby. Not like this.”

Her mother pushes up against her, flank to flank, and Laura III whimpers at the warmth. 

“It won’t be.”

Laura III pushes back against her mother’s leg. 

“What do you mean? What can you mean? Oh, here it comes, it comes.”

She holds her mother’s hand tight, and feels it tighten on hers, as the pain takes her under into a place where she has no words, only the red of her clenched eyelids, and the cramping of her back. When she surfaces, they’re close on the bunker, the long dune buildings that blend into the snow so well that you have to know to a degree, to a second, where they are to find them, even in a satellite photo. Then the six digit code to enter. No room for errors, for wild ones, for strays, not any more.

Her mother’s voice is low and soothing against the bright harsh light of the snow. “Just a few more steps and we’re home. You’ve not long now, sweetheart.”

She takes the steps slowly, deliberately, her hips clicking like they’ll separate, the snow skitting away like frightened rabbits. Hand on the door.

“Your meaning. Quickly before we’re in.”

Laura II looks hard at Laura III. Laura III is holding the railing still, and her face is the one that she made as a child, refusing sleep, refusing shoes, refusing.

“If you’re lucky, and I hope you’re lucky, your children follow in your footsteps. Pawprints. Born Shifted.”

Her daughter’s face crumples quickly, and she can see the hand tighten on the rail. It’s been less than a minute. Laura II holds Laura III’s hand again. Her daughter speaks still, through gritted teeth. “What if they’re not?” 

She can see the contraction rolling across her daughter’s stomach and her daughter’s hand tightens on hers like a vice. She waits it out, until her daughter gasps it out and pants in the release of tension.

“You were a cub. Two of your sibs weren’t. The lab has no resources for children who won’t Shift. Your father – “ and Laura II is silenced by the crushing pressure on her hand, and she looks, and her daughter has Shifted, her ears tucked back and head thrown back in a silent howl. 

It is there and then that her litter is born, by the door, on the cold tiles, under the surveillance camera and there’s no hiding the fact that although three are born furred, there is one pink human baby amongst them, squalling at the cold, not nosing up against his mother to suckle as he should be, and Laura II knows the rules. Knows too that there’s no denying it, under the black eye of the camera. She tries anyway, as she tried for all her litters born in or out of the bunker, to smuggle and snuggle the baby inside her jersey, and she can feel letdown out of two of the six, that her grandbaby latches onto, and there’s that at least that he’ll have of his family. Though it’s scant comfort for Laura III, or Laura II, later that night, in the sub-zero temperature of spring, thinking of the nameless pink babe left to freeze on the slopes.  
 


	3. Wolf III

The wind howled through the first, who hummed right back at it. The roof of the homestead shook, and a window flapped open, chill breeze down his neck.

“Best check on the chickens now, Hammer dog,” Vinh said, without moving a muscle from the lumpy armchair by the flickering fire, never warm enough, but as much as his stores would allow against the cold. The dog looked at him reproachfully.

“I’ll open the door for you, opposable thumbs and all, if you duck down and check the chook pen’s not open. There’s an extra chunk of meat in it for you?”

The dog curled tighter, its nose tucked under a fold of the fireside rug.

“C’mon then boyo. The two of us.” Straightened his back. Fixed the warped window shut. The dog whined. “No more of that now.”

He shut the door tightly, to keep the cold in. Outside, the wind was indeed bitter, cold rain stinging like pinpricks through his jumper, through his vest. The dog followed tight on his heels.

The chickens were indeed out too, several roosting in the tree, swinging back and forth in the vagaries of the wind. Some scuttled around aimlessly on the ground, racing from one sheltering lump in the dark to another. One alone was in its henhouse, the sole hen with any sense. 

In the noise of the wind, and the excitement of chasing the chickens, the low growl of his dog could have been too easily missed, but it raised the hairs on the back of his neck. His dog was ignoring the chickens altogether, facing outwards, nose pointed rigidly against the dark. Ignoring the chickens himself, he felt the growl as a physical thing before it emerged from his throat.

Eyes, golden and red in the dark. More than a pair, less than twenty. A smell more pungent than the chicken shit splattering his boots. His hands itched for the comfort of a gun, an axe, a locked door. Too foolish to come outside on a night like this, too trusting to think that his farm, his stock, his family, didn’t need protection. The wall of the farmhouse was solid against his back, and the chickens scattered up to roost in the branches, or hide with their sister in the henhouse, or so a flicker of his eyes seemed to tell him.

A flicker was all he had before the wolves advanced, and he saw his dog faithfully jump for the neck of one before another was at his arm, snarling and flashing teeth. The shout that came from him, a planned defiant scream to wake his wife and startle the wolf in his leap came out wrong. Something more. Something deep and hackle raising, even his own. The wolf did, indeed, stop in its leap, for an instant, the instant he needed to swing the punch firm against its head, solid and bruising his knuckles. His hands found themselves around the wolf’s giant neck, and picking it up by the nape as if it weighed less than one of the chickens, and throwing it against the fence, still straining in the wind. 

He turned and faced the other four, two at the centre of the pen, one at the base of the tree, and the last approaching the roost. Made himself advance on the roost, a noted that his vision was narrowing, funnelling out extraneous details like that his dog was facing down the other three, low hum in his throat, and the stunned body of the fifth against the fence. 

“My chickens,” he said, or tried to say, but it came out thick and heavy and his teeth felt too big in his mouth. He settled for a snarl. 

The wolf answered him in kind, and he fancied he understood, a cry of hunger, of miles with no food, and pups to feed, and the cold, always the cold. He felt, under the risen hair at the back of his own neck, and his fear, a something sad, and understanding, a choke at the back of his throat. His two children inside, his wife. His lost origin and lost predecessors. The future uncertain against the cold.  
He advanced further, and the wolf held her ground, feet large and furred on the hay and chickenshit, and shoulders braced for a leap, if need be.

There was a chicken, past her laying days, in the roost. She’d been marked for a meal soon enough anyway. It was the work of a second to reach his arm in, and pull her out, longer than it would have taken to think about why he was doing it, or how it was his arm was stretching out the seams of his sleeve. The chicken’s neck snapped and he held its body high. 

“This is for the journey. You can’t stay here, I have mouths to feed too,” is what he fancied he said, and he threw the corpse into the dark, into the wind’s howl beyond his fenced land.

The white furred one by the roost stared him, and his dog down, while the three others loped out. A long yellow eyed stare. A silent one, which he met inch for inch. Second for second. The one by the fence slowly rose itself up, shaking its head, flecks of spittle flying about in the wind, and looking wildly about until his eyes landed on the female. Then, shoulders dropping low, sideways slunk from the pend, eyes fastened on a spot between him and the female, and he would have called that wolf afraid, if he was using words.

The female took one last look at the chickens in the coop. In the tree. At him. Turned her back, confident or uncaring and trotted out into the dark. Faintly in the dark, on the fence, he could see her relieving herself on the post. Then gone.

Without conscious thought, in the same vein as the whole night, he followed after, and adjusted his trousers, and followed suit. On all the fenceposts, until he’d exhausted his supply. His dog seemed impressed enough, taking his turn. 

He securely fastened the gate, the coop, the windows, tied down the shelter over his wood. Inside, nothing had changed, save that the fire needed another log, and that he was hungry.


	4. Wolf IV

She wipes her hands a final time. There’s no blood left under her nails, she thinks, to attract attention. She can still smell it. Metal tang in her nose, at the back of her throat. There’s a hair at the back of her teeth, and she chokes as she scrapes her fingers around her mouth to get it out. These are the moments she hates. 

The hair is dark and short. It could be a human’s hair. It could be a dog’s. She can’t tell. She tests herself to see whether she cares. She doesn’t.

The face that meets her in the mirror is calm. She has no blood on her face. There’s no canines showing. There’s no snarl. She looks at the make up by the mirror, the dusty foundation, the subtle rose lip paint, the eyeliner, the mascara, and she wants to. She wants to howl. She does not. 

The make up paints her face, cakes her clean into society again. There are people waiting in the hall for her speech, the latest set of statements about how climate change can be reversed, the world unfrozen, the ice age broken if only they put their trust in her party, under her leadership, and in her platform. If they band together and take back the cities. Take the steps she and the leadership team plotted out, reconstructed from the notes from two centuries before, the reclamation of the cities. The restart of the great ocean currents. The slow increase of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. She doesn’t know if it’s true, she only knows the talking points right now. It’s not really important. She knew the truth when she wrote them. Or someone did. It’s a little hazy now. From the notes, Laura and Rob and their group were genetic engineers. Nothing to do with the ocean, or the atmosphere. She’s nevertheless certain. The points were as true as the blood at the back of her throat. 

There’s blood in the air, but it’s under talcum powder now. She’s dusted herself down. It’s coming from the hall, from the people waiting. They don’t need to hear from her wolf now, and she swallows it down. 

The knock on her door summons, and she answers the call. The hall is full, all eyes on her, looking for an answer, a truth and she tells them what she has to tell. 

She can smell them, her pack, the excitement. The belief as strong as thick syrup, as blood. They’re hers.

She talks on automatic. The points fall out of her mouth like spittle, in time with the slides as they click through. She has this down, and then she doesn’t. She can see the second where the woman who always nudges her way into the front of the line, always piles her plate the fraction too high, preens her neck just that little bit more than she should in public, and the guy behind her who’s meant to be mated into the family group he’s sitting with lean forward and sniff at her hair, and the family matriarch turn and snarl and there’s teeth bared, and then there’s a flurry of biting and ripping, and she can smell the blood in the air. 

She remembers, at the back of her head, something one of her sibs had said, about losing the upper hand once the fangs are out, that violence is the refuge of the weak, and how that sib had died, another pack, another fight, another loss. And she leaps into the throng, changing just enough for the muscles to work, not enough to lose control of the animal inside. Her shoulders knock the smaller ones down, and the nips don’t , can’t hurt, and when she’s finished, the throng of infighting has dispersed, and the blood in the air is actual blood in the air, and she has one foolish trouble maker by an elongated ear, and she shakes him until he whimpers. 

Then, she has the satisfaction of striding between the scattered chairs, the shrinking back bodies, and ascending to the stage. She clears her throat. Her speaking notes are gone. Her canines are still visible, she is sure, over her lower lip.

“We are going to do this, because it needs to be done. Let’s not lose sight of the way, and the why. Our ancestors chose not to listen. You’re choosing not to listen now. If you can’t be bothered listening, I’m not going to be bothered talking. Your pack leaders will be given your assignments, and you’ll carry them out, or I’ll know the reason why. Get out of my sight.”

She wipes her paw, her hand, back across her mouth, the blood streaking bright. She stares them down, as they sullenly leave the hall, the thousands of wolflings. She wonders how many other halls went the same way. Whether any leader was given the courtesy of being allowed to finish their speech, whether anyone made it through to a question session, a polite interchange of thoughts, a respectful debate on the merits, or if every vestige of scientific discourse had left every one of the bunkers, as it has in hers. 

She’s never been one to dwell on failures. She wouldn’t have made a great scientist. But she is certain, as certain as the white of the snow outside, that her pack will do as she’s said. Until the day that they won't.


End file.
